


The way out is through

by carbonbased000



Category: Bandom, Fall Out Boy
Genre: Alternate POV, Blow Jobs, Canon Compliant, Coffee Shops, Coming Out, Divorce, Domesticity, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Getting Together, Light Angst, M/M, Mutual Pining, RPF, for a given value of canon, talking about feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-09
Updated: 2021-02-07
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:00:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 18,527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22638850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carbonbased000/pseuds/carbonbased000
Summary: A story about time, belonging, and making a life with someone who's always been there. In which Patrick gets a divorce, has a sexuality crisis, and tries to find himself—but mostly he wants Pete.
Relationships: Patrick Stump/Pete Wentz
Comments: 200
Kudos: 132





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

>   
> [Playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/00grNG8mnIkcq5DM1LM8Qq?si=dVj7CkpiT0GrRunhLGvGIQ)!

It’s early, way too early to be awake. Patrick lies in bed for a long time; unable to fall back asleep, unable to get up, he stares at the gray ceiling and waits for the shapeless buzz of his thoughts to settle down into something verbal. _No one understands_ , he thinks finally, and then almost laughs out loud. What a Pete thing to think, and not even today-Pete: no, more like twenty-something, straightened-hair, blackened-eyes Pete. A person who doesn’t exist anymore.

The sheer dramatic ridiculousness of the thought doesn’t take away from the truth of it: no one _actually_ understands his situation. He finds himself in the weirdest place he has ever been in his life, without a map, no sun or stars in the sky to help him orient himself. He’s the most clueless thirty-five-year-old who has ever walked the earth, with all the self-awareness of a newborn puppy. 

Everything is profoundly odd, these days. Stretching out in this bed that still smells like the furniture store; the chance to sleep as long as he likes, which he used to dream about—no alarm blaring, no kids jumping up on the bed to wake him up none too gently asking for breakfast, _now_ —but is proving completely impossible as his brain still switches on nice and early, ready for the school run that he is now supposed to do only once a week.

If he thinks about it too hard, his mind will start spinning; he turns onto his side, grabs his phone on the bedside table and unlocks it, looking for a distraction. He rapidly cycles through every app before he realizes he’s hoping to find a new text, email, notification, _anything_ from Pete.

There is nothing. He rubs his eyes, pushes back the blankets, and sits up, stretches his arms high over his head, breathing deeply. His thoughts are a formless D-minor fizzle; he hums it out under the shower until it coalesces into a tentative harmony. Once he’s dressed, he checks his phone again—nothing again—and then he tells himself, _Might as well,_ and goes into the studio. 

The saddest word in the Italian language, according to many people who actually speak it—unlike Patrick, whose knowledge comes from spending five minutes on Duolingo a couple of times a day—is _ormai._ It is untranslatable—which is sad in itself, the idea that some meanings simply cannot cross the bridge between languages. Roughly, it stands for _by now_ , _at this point_ – but there is a concept of finality in the word, a resigned sigh woven between its letters— _too late, nothing to be done,_ all in a five-letter word. 

Patrick read about this hopeless little adverb years ago, in some book Pete had left lying around on the tour bus—he forgets what book, and which tour, and which bus. There were just so many, and Patrick forgets. Sometimes, he does it on purpose.

For a long time, Pete was always surrounding himself with books. Books filling half his bag, left open on the carpeted floor of hotel rooms; an unstable pile of them next to his bed in the back room of the bus; lying over every flat surface of his first house in LA—plus one left open, spine up, over the back of the couch. Books he used to reread over and over—Kerouac and Henry Miller and e.e. cummings. Sometimes, Patrick would try and gauge Pete’s mood from the books he was reading. _On the Road_ was a good sign when they were on tour, not so much when they weren’t; _Where The Wild Things Are_ meant he was homesick and Patrick should probably get him to call his mom. 

_I’ll eat you up, I love you so_. Patrick has read that to his kids a hundred times—“Do the voices, daddy!”—and has thought about Pete every single time. It didn’t seem wrong to think of him in that context—in his kids' bedroom, in the house where he lived with his wife—because back then Pete was just Pete. His bandmate, best friend, and creative partner for more than half of Patrick’s life.

 _Back then_ : it’s just a few months ago. It feels like years. 

His mind does this thing now, all the fucking time, spiralling away into melancholy and memories and free-falling association. _Ormai_ is what came to mind while he was trying to come up with a working title for this demo. It feels blue, nostalgic; it feels like reliving one of those nights he used to spend at Pete’s when they first came to live here, eating junk food in front of the huge brand-new TV, endlessly marathoning movies they had already seen dozens of times, Patrick eventually crashing in the guest room or, sometimes, still on the couch. Keeping Pete company, he used to tell himself, pretending he didn’t get just as much comfort from Pete’s presence. 

The demo feels blue, and god knows Pete has sent him plenty of blue lyrics over time. Recently, though, Patrick has been finding it very hard to be as detached as he needs to be for this part of the process. He’s really gone and fucked _everything_ up, huh. He suddenly wishes he could go back. Not to his marriage—that was over, would have been over anyway—but to the time he took those lyrics and turned them into songs without ever asking Pete what they actually meant. _By now_ , though, _at this point_ —he can’t go back. And at the same time, he can’t really move on. He’s stuck.

Getting ahold of Pete is slightly harder, these days. Their pattern has changed so much over the years—Pete almost stalking him when they met, texting entirely too much while Patrick was in class; then it was Patrick checking in whenever a few days passed without calls or texts, concerned, pretending that he needed someone’s phone number or that he’d forgotten about some deadline for the label; the time when they didn’t know how to talk to each other in person without it turning into a fight, and even the phone calls weren’t much better; then the hiatus and the longest breakdown in their communication.

Since the band got back together, in this as in everything else, Pete has been careful. He rarely just calls out of nowhere; he doesn’t even text when he knows Patrick isn’t supposed to be working. He never texts after midnight or so—even though he knows very well that Patrick is way more likely to be awake than asleep. Still. He’s never failed to answer Patrick. 

_Got something for you to listen to._

Five minutes, and Patrick’s phone starts trying to buzz itself down the desk as Pete’s name lights up the screen.

“Hey, Patrick,” he says, without waiting for a hello. “You’re writing?”

Patrick is so startled by how _good_ it is simply to hear Pete’s voice that he almost tells him so, straight out. God, what a disaster.

“Yep,” he says, and tries to imagine Pete’s expression, the slight smile warming up his voice. “And I could use your opinion on something.”

“Now? You want to send it to me, stay on the phone?”

“Hm, I was thinking—Would you—” Oh for fuck’s sake. “Do you have time for coffee at that place you like, the one on Third Street?

Pete makes a soft sound of surprise, but says, “Oh, sure. I’ll pick you up?”

“You don’t have to, we can meet there.”

“Nah, it’s okay, you’re on the way, I’ll be there in an hour. Later,” Pete says, and the call disconnects. 

Patrick gets lost in perfecting the bassline and is startled out of his trance by his phone, that buzzes again with a rapid succession of incoming texts and finally succeeds in launching itself off his desk. He rescues it up from the floor and swipes absently on the screen to reply, _on my way!_

He puts on a clean t-shirt and fixes his hair before rushing out the door. It feels absurd to do that for Pete, but he can’t help it. 

They’ve been working for at least an hour—Pete reading him lyrics from his phone, Patrick listening to the unripe song playing over and over at low volume in his headphones and trying to put it all together—when the waiter drops by their table to clear off their cups and plates and ask if they want anything else. He’s very attractive in an objective but still interesting way, Patrick decides. Nice hands, a tattoo peeking out of his sleeve like an overgrown vine. Nice smile. Not so young that Patrick feels like a creep when he smiles back. 

The waiter—nameless, as this is one of Patrick’s favorite places, and he likes his cafés on the hipster side of the spectrum, with mismatched cups and battered wooden tables and the waitstaff in flannel shirts regardless of the weather and categorically _sans_ name tags—holds Patrick’s gaze a few seconds too long, curling his lips in a smile that feels more flirty and less service-industry. Or maybe he’s just friendly and polite, or has recognized them, or is having a good day because he’s in the honeymoon phase with his new girlfriend. Patrick lowers his gaze, putting his headphones back on. Who the fuck even knows—he is so bad at this that even calling himself a beginner feels overambitious: he can’t read the signs, can’t speak the language; he’s not learning, not sure whether he should even try. The waiter writes down their second order and crosses the room back to the kitchen. 

When Patrick looks up from his laptop again, Pete is wearing an unreadable expression. He says something, but it’s eaten up by the music playing in the headphones. Could be a _what_ , maybe. He looks fleetingly over Patrick’s shoulder, towards the bar, then back at him. His forehead scrunches up, showing the frown lines that have etched themselves there over the last few years, so slowly that Patrick didn’t notice, just like he hasn’t noticed the new wrinkles forming on his own, until one day, suddenly—there they were.

“What,” he says, finally, when Pete is still looking at him intently, like he’s the most interesting thing in the whole city. 

Pete shrugs, summons a half-crooked smile that shows just a hint of teeth. It’s a move so familiar from years of fake nonchalance— _Who, me? You know I’m not that smart_ —that Patrick is suddenly very afraid. He can count on the fingers of one hand the times he’s been the object of that affected carelessness, and he hasn’t enjoyed a single one of them. He deflects, plays an alternate version of the song, pretends it’s some new breakthrough. 

Pete believes him, or at least lets him get away with it. For now.

*

It happened a few months before—in a hotel room in Japan, the night before a festival. Miserable with jet-lag, Patrick couldn’t sleep, couldn’t concentrate on anything. The ring was still on his finger but it felt fake, with the marriage crumbling around him in slow motion, and he was so fucking sad about it and yet couldn’t think of anything he could do anymore; not a single thing, it seemed like, that he hadn’t already tried. He was a troubled, overtired, vulnerable mess, and he couldn’t possibly be in his own company for one more minute, and that was the only reason why he’d finally texted Pete, just to see if he was up. 

Pete was, of course, and he’d texted back, _swing by my room if you wanna hang out_ —and so they spent that afternoon, evening, possibly morning, watching indecipherable Japanese TV shows and raiding the minibar. Patrick could see the ghost of an eerily similar scene from eight or nine or ten years before, like another image superimposed to the one that was in front of his eyes, a double exposure of then and now. They were sitting on the thickly carpeted floor in front of the too-large TV at the foot of the too-big bed, not so much as a hand’s breadth between them. Their younger versions had different clothes, different hair; there was a ghost ring on Pete’s finger but not on Patrick’s; it was Patrick keeping Pete company and not the opposite. 

Then Pete said his name, maybe because Patrick had been silent for a long time, maybe in an attempt to distract him from whatever thoughts he was clearly getting lost in; in any case, the memory shattered like a pane of glass and Patrick felt it like a physical blow, suddenly finding himself so completely off-balance that he could have sworn the floor was tilting slightly to the side. He looked down, just to check.

“Patrick?” Pete said again, concern clear in his voice now, and Patrick wanted to let him know he was alright, that it was only a bit of time-travel—he thought he’d make a joke out of that, maybe, make Pete chuckle under his breath in the quiet way he did when it was just the two of them —only he felt a lump in his throat and he couldn’t remember how to speak. He hummed in acknowledgment and looked up, trying for a reassuring smile. 

Pete smiled back, relieved and immediate, and their eyes met. Patrick looked at him, the last afterimages of the past falling away—this was Pete, now, in that cream sweatshirt that was three sizes too big, long black hair pulled back behind his ears, smile so bright that it warmed up the whole room despite the A/C being set on freezing. And Patrick wasn’t just looking at Pete anymore, he realized suddenly—he was drinking him in, like he could absorb that warmth through his gaze, like the light glittering in Pete’s eyes was the sun and Patrick had been in the dark for months, like—

Something weird ran down his spine; a warm kind of shiver. He felt hot, then cold all over, then felt himself blush, and Pete was starting to look a bit weirded out, but his eyes were still on Patrick, still warm with affection, and—

“I need to go,” Patrick stammered out, and made up something about finally feeling sleepy, and practically ran out the door, pretending not to see Pete’s face fall, pretending he didn’t really want to stay, pretending. 

Back in his room, he took off his shoes, sat on the edge of the bed, and looked out the window, where the sun was rising, or possibly setting. He took off his wedding ring—it slid away easily. He set it gently on the glass top of the bedside table, next to the half-full glass of water that he was drinking before going to Pete’s room. He registered a ridiculous thought—that the Patrick who had drunk from that glass _before_ wasn’t the same Patrick he was now. 

If a guy has an existential crisis alone in a hotel room on the other side of the world and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?


	2. Chapter 2

Sometimes Pete will take a selfie just to remember he’s real. 

Now, for example—holed up in the bathroom at his childhood house, hiding out from lunch with his mom and dad. As soon as he sat at the table, he felt weighted down by anxiety for some fucking reason, his whole body filling with dread. It wasn’t helped by his mom’s tone as she announced how _nice_ it would have been if Meagan and the kids had come up for the weekend, too—fake and cheerful like there was some invisible stranger sitting at the table with them, who needed to be kept in the dark about Pete’s freaky co-parenting system. 

So he looks in the mirror, his back to the white blinds that are so familiar he feels like they’ve been imprinted right into his DNA, and snaps a picture of the good-son outfit he wore today—dusty pink lambswool sweater, collared shirt buttoned all the way up, hair tied back. His eyes are so tired, though, that they’re ringed black—he smiles, the shape of it feeling weird on his lips, considers sending the pic to Patrick, adding, _thinking abt bringing the eyeliner back_ —and Patrick would reply, horrified, _Do not even joke about that_.

Things are weird between them, right now, though, so he refrains. There’s a handful of texts from Patrick on his phone that Pete has not answered in days. He hasn’t craved a Xanax this strongly in a really long time. 

He just posts his selfie on Instagram, and then carefully washes his hands, buying himself some more time before going back out and getting through the ordeal of having lunch with his parents. 

His mom has been watching that Marie Kondo thing on Netflix, which resulted in him getting a threatening email a few weeks ago about the boxes “cluttering up” his old room in the attic. Since he’s home, and the kids are with their respective moms, and it’s the Thanksgiving weekend—and he can’t _possibly_ want to work even over Thanksgiving—he’s supposed to go through all that stuff and decide what brings him fucking _joy_. 

Pete starts taking out the contents of the first box and arranges them on the carpet. He stares at the result and thinks, _wow. Talk about broken down memory lane_. 

Rather than actually looking at the stuff, he opens up the Notes app on his phone—he's had words going around his head kind of shapelessly since before dinner and maybe writing something down will make them clearer. He writes—just a few lines, but not too awful. The only problem is, he’s not sure what he should do with his words anymore.

When the stuff in the boxes was still spread out on the carpet, piled on the desk and bookcases, the posters stuck on the walls up to the ceiling—before his mom decided that tidying up would be the answer to life’s greater questions—he would have sent this lyrics embryo to Patrick via text, or email, or the pressing of a battered notebook into his hands. 

Now, it feels impossible, because Patrick would _get it_. He’s never gotten it before—has always been, in fact, fucking _relentless_ in not getting it. His dedication to staying on the surface of whatever Pete meant to say was steadfast and true.

And in a way, he was doing it for Pete’s own good: turning his words—his heart-on-the-sleeve, bleeding-out, mangled-guts-pretending streams of consciousness—into something that could be recorded and packaged, sold and consumed; into _lyrics_ , caged in a meter, sung with conviction, issued to the outside world. 

Patrick built an armor around him, and it was probably for the best—Pete wouldn’t have even known where to start. He can’t imagine what his life would have been like if he’d been any clearer. Even from behind the frosted glass, he almost died of exposure. 

“I had to throw away all my golf clubs, you know,” says his dad’s voice from the doorway, behind Pete’s back. 

Pete turns to him and makes a face. “They didn’t bring joy?”

His dad walks further into the room, laughing. “Not according to your mother, no.”

“I thought you were supposed to decide on your own stuff?”

“Well, yes, in theory,” his dad sighs, plopping down on Pete’s childhood bed and resting his elbows on his parted knees. “But it was strongly suggested that someone who doesn’t play golf anymore shouldn’t have all those clubs.”

“Well, I mean,” says Pete, thinking of all the absurd sports equipment he has stored—or more, like, haphazardly strewn—in his garage at home. “You never know—”

“Ha!” his dad interrupts, raising his finger in the air like he thinks he has the winning point in an argument. “Never say those words. ‘You never know’ is what you tell yourself when you don’t have the guts to confront your demons and get rid of… whatever it is that you have to get rid of.”

Pete gets the feeling that his dad has kind of bought into this whole tidying-up thing more than he would like to admit. 

“Are we talking actual demons here, or…”

“I think not. I think they’re a metaphor for emotional value, objects being tied up in memories, something like that.”

Again, Pete surveys the things spread out on the carpet between them. 

None of these things make him feel _joy_. But they sure make him feel _something._

“So you think I should throw all this shit away?” he asks his dad, even though the idea makes him feel a little sick. 

His dad chuckles. “No, I think you should do what feels right. You can keep everything if you want—maybe just take it with you at a certain point so we can turn this into a yoga room or whatever your mom’s next hobby is.”

He stands up and goes over to Pete, squeezing his shoulder with one warm hand. “Take your time.”

“Yeah, this might take a moment,” Pete says, and his dad smiles at him before heading back downstairs, leaving him to sift through the minefield of memories. His mom should give him hazard pay for this. 

One by one, he empties all the boxes, sorting the contents into three piles he dubs—mentally; if he has to leave the room to hunt down post-its to label them he’s pretty sure he’s not coming back—KEEP, TRASH, IDK. 

It’s weird, but his anxiety eases up as he goes on, and after a while the process gets to be almost peaceful. He’s not in the best mood to do this in any rational way—he feels a bit flat and grey and, on any other day, he would probably care about some of the stuff that today he sends to the TRASH pile without a second thought. 

His mom has instructed him to touch everything—it helps you decide, apparently—so he does, handling soccer tournament medals and jerseys he hasn’t worn since high-school and postcards from ex-girlfriends before getting rid of everything, everything. 

He feels kind of exhilarated, in the end, because the TRASH pile is huge, and his mom and Marie Kondo are going to be very proud of him. 

The KEEP pile, on the other hand, consists of a small number of things:

  * Xeroxed flyers for shows from 2002 and 2003; 
  * issues of _AP_ and _Kerrang!_ and _Rock Sound_ with their faces on the cover or on the inside pages or on fold-out posters;
  * half-destroyed notebooks carrying the battle scars of life in the van;
  * an entire box of t-shirts he used to wear as a twentysomething and that could maybe fit Bronx now.



Basically, the piles reflect the way his life has a clean break down the middle—Before Patrick on one side, After Patrick on the other. And Pete or, like, the part of his psyche that has done this job for him—he thinks it’s the same part that takes over when he’s in a state of flux, when he plays tennis or writes or drives down the coast at night—has decided that whatever came BP can be trashed with no regret. 

Patrick’s second-to-last text to him reads, _I think I have another song._

Pete hasn’t answered it yet. This has never happened before. It has never even come to mind. 

*

“There was—um, I had a moment,” Patrick said—last week, was it?, the week before that? Time seems to stretch back, stretch thin, like an elastic band, bringing him back, bringing him forward. The question, the very first one, was about that fucking waiter who'd made eyes at Patrick—that was nothing new, of course, but usually Patrick didn’t return the staring. Usually, he didn’t even notice. Or was it a case of plausible deniability? 

Pete’s mind is fucking reeling. Patrick gave this come-hither look at the waiter, and Patrick pretended like nothing had happened, and Pete pretended not to see, but then he couldn’t leave it the fuck alone, because, because—it was probably just one of those Patrick things, right, he was caught up in the music, he was distracted, he was thinking of a chord progression, he was making bedroom eyes at a brand-new idea for an harmony—but Pete asked, later, in the car, just to put his mind at rest, simply, simply, _What was up with that_ , and Patrick had replied absently, looking out the passenger side, _What was up with what_ , and Pete had told him, half-joking, _That eyefucking thing with the waiter_ , and even though he was looking at the road he saw Patrick’s blush—it was a blush that could light up the whole car, a blush that made him think of Patrick at seventeen, shy, angry, upset by Pete’s very existence—and though the radio was playing, some poppy and upbeat song that he doesn’t remember—he heard the silence stretch on, and on, and on; he said Patrick’s name as a question, and could feel how his own voice was wrapped up in fear, trembling. 

And then Patrick said he’d had a moment. It was impossible to misunderstand what he meant, but Pete considered faking it anyway. He was driving—a legitimate reason to be distracted—and he wanted to be the one to not get it, for once. 

Instead, stupid and reckless like he’d been at twenty-two, Pete asked him, simply, “When?”

Stupid and reckless like he’d been at seventeen, Patrick replied, “In Japan.”

And the thing is, Pete remembers that moment, that hotel room, very well. He was so convinced he had said or done something to freak Patrick out, to make him run away from him so fast that Pete couldn’t even get a word in before he heard the door slam shut. He remembers turning over every thing he’d said, every look he’d directed at Patrick, all through that first sleepless, jet-lagged night. He remembers being concerned when he noticed Patrick wasn’t wearing his wedding ring the following morning—he’d put it back on for the show and slid it off the second he could get away with it. When they came back home, Patrick had this grim determination about him, was talking about his marriage as a done thing, and disappeared in short order in a whirlwind of lawyers and apartment hunting and custody calendars, updating Pete on his progress via text and the occasional phone call, and that strange moment was lost in the inevitable messiness of divorce.

*

Patrick’s last text to him reads, _Are we okay?_

Pete’s being a self-centered dick. He needs to stop freaking out and be a decent friend. He was fine before—he saw Patrick with his handful of girlfriends, and he was fine. He saw him get married, and he was fucking fine. This is _not about him._ Pete calls him. 


	3. Chapter 3

Patrick’s therapist recommended he plan fun things for the kids, small surprises and such, so they don’t have time to focus on the negatives. The first full weekend they spent together, he took them out to lunch—burgers and ice cream—and then slathered them and himself in 80+ SPF, and brought them to a new park with splash pads and a climbing wall. Back home, he plopped both children in the tub with an assortment of bath toys and all the bubbles they could possibly desire while he quickly rinsed off at the sink. After that, dressed in clean pajamas and smelling like lavender and vanilla thanks to the organic bubble bath with the drawing of a baby hippo on the tube—which Patrick might use himself, as well, so what, it smells amazing—they all settled on the couch with blankets and pizza and _Monsters, Inc._

Even bedtime, which he was quite worried about, went okay—they nodded off after a couple of stories and a lullaby. They seemed to be getting used to their new beds and new room way better than Patrick, who was still wide awake at 3 AM, when the kids woke up and requested entry to the Big Bed. After that, they slept like a pile of puppies for another three hours, dad included.

Soon enough, they’ve built a rhythm, and every other weekend goes along those lines. It’s good, better than Patrick expected, even with the occasional tantrum or melancholy moment.

And every other Monday, as soon as he’s driving home after dropping them off at school, he experiences such a deep sense of loneliness that sometimes he has to pull over and take a few deep breaths, resting his forehead against the driving wheel, telling himself that it’s fine.

It’s fine.

It’s just that he’s inhabiting somebody else’s skin, and it fits wrong.

He goes home, brews a cup of tea, starts working, and doesn’t stop until he feels himself again.

He hasn’t touched the demo after his session with Pete at the coffee place, and if he leaves it to fester some more he’s going to delete the whole sorry mess, which would be a pity, because it’s probably not that bad. It’s not the song’s fault if Pete’s not speaking to him.

So, he sends the wretched thing to Joe, who adds his own stuff and sends it back, and after that Patrick calls him and asks him to come over and work on it together a bit, even if it’s not their usual MO—but Joe seems perfectly happy to come to his place, work on the demo for a couple of hours, and then sit on the balcony and crack open a couple of beers while they’re waiting for the takeout to get there.

“So, how are things?” Joe asks him, and takes a swig, looking over the hills.

Patrick has a kind of spiel by now that he performs when someone asks him about his life; it spares him the anxiety of coming up with novel ways of expressing his angst each time, and it’s not like any of it is untrue. He does feel a little guilty about using it on Joe, though, so after he’s done, he goes off-script for a bit, saying, “Can I tell you something weird?”

“Of course, man, always,” Joe says, looking at him now, earnestly, his sea-blue eyes wide.

“Like, this isn’t the—the _real reason_ or anything like that. It’s just something that I realized and I’m still working on it, but, um–” Patrick trails off and drains the last half of his beer. He really wants to go inside to get another bottle, but he also needs to spit it out, at this point. Joe just waits him out, because they’ve been friends since they were painfully awkward teenagers and Joe learned a long time ago that this is the best way to make Patrick talk. “So, as it turns out, I might not be as straight as I thought I was,” Patrick finally says, and. Ugh. He didn’t realize that just _finding the words to say this_ would be so fucking difficult, and he’s felt like he’s messed up every single time he’s tried to.

This is the fourth time Patrick has had this conversation; the first time he’s trying to call it what it is, at least in his mind; not even remotely the last he’s going to need to say the same things, and brace for some kind of impact.

There was the passing remark he made on a phone call to Megan, something breezy and weightless like, “I might give guys a chance, this time,” while they were talking of his new single status. She laughed and said, “No, but actually, I heard Tinder is pretty good these days.”

Then came whatever the fuck that conversation in Pete’s car was.

Then it was Kevin, at Thanksgiving—he actually had the nerve to tell Patrick he’d heard there was a mysterious new woman in his life—and Patrick wished his brother read TMZ, but the truth was he didn’t, and by the way TMZ didn’t care about him anymore, provided it ever had, and the culprit behind that piece of gossip was probably his aunt Emily, making assumptions and spreading them via every cousin twice and thrice removed. He wasn’t sure which part he found more exasperating—the general idea that someone getting divorced was sure to have a new relationship lined up; or that he in particular must need a woman to take care of him while he’s off being a genius, like… Leonard fucking Bernstein or something. (That is not the best example, maybe.) Anyway, he was frustrated, and that’s why when he opened his mouth to answer his brother, he blurted out, “There’s no one, and if there was it would probably be a guy.”

Kevin paled and had to sit down. It took a glass of something strong and Patrick confirming that yes, he was serious and yes, it was strictly theoretical for now, but after that he was a pretty convincing supportive older brother.

Patrick can’t remember what he was so afraid of, because Joe is supportive from the start—no alcohol or confirmation of celibacy needed. He also tells him, “Thank you for trusting me with this,” and, “I think you’re really brave,”—the first one in a series of people who will tell Patrick the exact same thing in the following weeks—and, “You should probably try to, um, you know. Experiment. A bit?”

Andy—conversation number five, a few days later—bless him, just comes out and says, “You need to get laid.”

They’re probably right, both of them. He _is_ brave, in some weird slightly twisted way, and he _does_ need to get laid—but he’s also a mess, and lonely, and afraid, and he only wants a single person who doesn’t want him.

*

Patrick can’t remember—there’s so much he can’t remember, this is starting to become a _leitmotif_ in his mind—where it was, or when, but this pair of fans stopped them on the street somewhere, on one of their rare off-days, while they were sightseeing somewhere in Europe —Paris maybe? Stockholm? Amsterdam?—it was him and Pete, anyway, and these two girls, he remembers _them_. They matched—hoodies, band shirts, ripped jeans, beat-up Converse, purple streaks in their hair—and they were holding each other’s hand, and they never let go the whole time they talked to them. It wasn’t that long, five minutes maybe, but it was long enough for him to notice. One of them did the talking while the other one stood slightly to the side, smiling and blushing, and Patrick stood slightly apart as well, and smiled back, while Pete and the fan talked with hushed, serious voices for a few minutes, and then Pete offered a one-armed hug to the both of them, and Patrick did the same, and the girls waved, smiling hard enough that their mouths probably hurt, after, and Pete and he went on to wherever they were headed that day.

And later, on the bus, in one of those moments when you’re not sure what time it is, and which state/country you are in, still a bit jet-lagged, maybe, he mentioned them to Pete, said they were very sweet, holding hands like that, and their smiles.

“Yeah,” Pete had said, with a soft smile. “They were one of those.”

“One of what?”

“Oh, you know. We saved their lives. They got together at one of our shows. The kid was telling me about the day she came out to her family and—”

“Oh,” Patrick murmured. They didn’t just match. They were a _couple_. Of course.

Pete’s voice trailed off. “What?” he asked. “What’s with the thousand-yard stare? Patrick?”

“I didn’t realize they were, like… together,” Patrick said, feeling supremely dumb.

Pete didn’t say anything. Left to their own devices, Patrick’s thoughts multiplied and spiraled up to form a huge wave right on the verge of crashing down on him. He was rescued by the barely-there touch of Pete’s fingers on the back of his hand.

“Hey,” Pete said. “Breathe.”

Patrick did, and looked up to thank him, but when their eyes met, he was sucked right back into the spiraling panic. He blurted out the first thing off the top of his head, just to try and contain whatever the fuck was going on his mind. “I—I think those kids are amazing.”

“Yeah?” Pete asked, in that perfectly neutral tone that he used in meetings, in interviews, and only very rarely with Patrick.

“Yeah, ‘cause…” and suddenly he really wanted to explain himself, to make sense of the swirling mess in his head and in his chest; if anyone could get it, could get him, it would be Pete. “Because it must be so hard to overcome all those obstacles, but then you have that, you can be with the person you love, and that must mean you really, really want it.”

Pete had looked at him strangely, then, and it was one of the worst feelings in the world. Like getting in trouble when you’re a little kid and seeing that look on your mom’s face where she tries very hard not to show just how disappointed she is, but you notice, and you feel it down to your bones. “I mean,” Pete said eventually, with a half smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “You kind of have to really want it even if you’re straight, you know. Who you fall in love with isn’t exactly a choice.”

“Right,” Patrick said. “Of course.” And then he made up some excuse about needing to work on something and retreated to his bunk, fervently wishing this were a hotel night and he had some of those cute mini bar bottles to gulp down, or at least that they hadn’t cleaned up their act so thoroughly and kept some fucking alcohol on the bus.

*

So, Joe tells him he’s _brave_ , when Patrick—okay: when he comes out. He’s heard that one before— _you’re so brave_ —about the divorce, and would be fine with not hearing it again, because, to be perfectly honest, in both cases, it was just… doing the only thing he could think of. His marriage couldn’t possibly go on like that, and his sexual identity crisis or whatever the fuck that is couldn’t possibly continue to rage a storm inside his head, so he finally asked for a divorce, so he finally told other people that he’s maybe not 100% straight.

Telling Pete actually felt like something brave, or maybe, more accurately, foolish, and sure enough, it got him a week plus of silent treatment from his best friend.

After nine days of silence (not that Patrick’s counting) and a handful of increasingly panicked texts in which he pretends that everything is fine—nothing weird going on, nothing to see here, move along—on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, his phone finally rings. As soon as he sees it's Pete’s name on the screen, his heart jumps in his throat, his stomach drops, and he feels warm all over. He snaps up the phone and immediately drops it and snatches it up again.

“Hey,” he croaks, pretending to be chill when he’s the farthest thing from that, and he’s fucked, instead, oh god he’s so utterly fucked.

“I’m sorry,” Pete says immediately, his words rushing out like he was holding his breath while Patrick was fumbling with the phone. “I’m so sorry, Patrick, I’m such an asshole.”

Patrick doesn’t ask, _Why were you an asshole, though?_ No, he takes the easy way out instead, says, “I’m—you don’t need to apologize. I know it’s a lot,” and if Joe heard him now, he would have a clearer picture of the way Patrick operates. So much for bravery.

“But Patrick, I mean, shit, it’s a lot _for you_ , I was supposed to be there for you, not like—freak out on you, like an idiot. I’m really sorry.”

More things Patrick doesn’t say at this point: _But you didn't just freak out. I saw you in the car, I heard you. You were terrified._ More things he doesn't ask: _What, are you afraid of me now? Is that it? What the fuck are you so afraid of?_ And these are things he would really like to know. But most of all, he’s just so fucking happy to hear Pete's voice. He just _really wants to see him_. He gulps down some more words, like, _I need to see you,_ and, _I’ve missed you like fucking_ air. “It’s okay,” he says, in the end—and if he used to let Pete off the hook before, now it’s only gotten worse. Obviously. “Really, it’s okay.” Silence, in which Patrick listens to Pete breathe while he investigates the inside of his chest, considers his heart—he feels its weight, its size, beating too fast, missing its cue. He roots around for traces of courage and finds none. “So, about that song,” he says.

“Oh, right!” Pete says, seemingly all too happy to change the subject. “Something new?”

“Yeah, well,” Patrick says. “I’ve been told I need to try new things.”


	4. Chapter 4

On the phone, Patrick mentioned he didn’t have the kids this weekend, and he was so cool and casual in saying it that Pete wrote it down and started scheming. Brendon had planned this pre-holiday bash a while ago, and Pete really had to go, so he pestered Patrick until he agreed to come along. A party is maybe not the best possible excuse to drag Patrick out of the house, historically, but Pete had the feeling that Patrick’s plan for this particular Saturday night was getting disastrously drunk alone at home, and this way, Patrick can get disastrously drunk at Brendon’s party, instead—which still beats doing it alone, so Pete will take the small victory.

It’s late, and they’ve been here a while, drinking and eating canapés and catching up with people—Patrick is chatting with Brendon across the room, talking with his hands as he does, and blushing, just slightly, which Pete notices only because Patrick is even paler than usual, these days. They’re right next to the kitchen island, and Pete wonders what they’re talking about as he watches Brendon pour more scotch into Patrick’s glass a couple of times.

The guests are mostly friends and acquaintances, but right now Pete is talking to this kid that Brendon just introduced him to, a singer-songwriter who apparently wants to break from the indie-pop mold, or something. He’s young, and pretentious, and looks like he teleported from an artisanal brewery in Williamsburg without taking the time to change clothes.

Pete is doing his best to listen, nodding and asking questions at appropriate intervals—but his mind keeps wandering and his eyes keep straying towards Patrick, who isn’t talking much anymore, just listening and nodding with a serious expression as Brendon talks, earnestly, in a low voice now, judging from how close they’re standing.

“So I was thinking of doing folk songs, you know, Dylan, Guthrie, the classics, but making it like… EDM slash dark-wave,” hipster guy says, recapturing Pete’s attention and making his beer go down the wrong way.

“That sounds, um–” he coughs. “Different. Sorry, I need to—” he says, gesturing vaguely towards the kitchen. Hipster guy frowns but nods, and if he’s going to go around telling people how Pete Wentz was very rude to him and didn’t get his musical genius, so fucking be it.

He walks away with an air of purpose that is totally faked, but hopefully convincing enough, and finds himself across the room, wondering too late whether he should maybe not interrupt Patrick’s conversation with Brendon, which was looking pretty intense. He’s almost turned back to rejoin the party, to circulate and make some more soul-sucking small talk, when Brendon catches his eye and tilts his head back, slightly, _come here_.

“Hey,” he says, when he’s close enough for them to hear him over the holiday playlist—Sinatra, of course—and Patrick raises his head and smiles at him, soft and quick but still dazzling.

“Hey,” Brendon says, and extricates himself, taking a step back from Patrick. “I think I’ll go and be the perfect host now. Later, guys.”

Pete takes Brendon’s place, sliding between the kitchen counter and Patrick, who waves his fingers at Brendon and then turns slightly to face Pete. He’s pink-faced, his eyes too bright—well on the way to drunk, and that’s on top of the tiredness, the redness around his eyes; he looks exhausted, and if Pete starts thinking about the fact that he was partly responsible for that, he’s going to drive himself crazy. Crazier. Whatever, he’s trying not to think about it, he apologized, he was forgiven, he was a fucking asshole but has been trying to make up for it.

“Come on, let’s sit down.”

“I’m fine,” Patrick protests.

“Oh, I’m sure you are, but these shoes are fucking torture, man.” It’s kind of true—he got these black Saint Laurent boots recently, for all the holiday parties coming up, and they look badass and give him a boost way bigger than the 1.5 inches of their heel, but yeah. They’re not even remotely broken in.

Patrick chuckles, “Why did you wear them, then?” But puts up no resistance at all when Pete gently steers him toward the couch with a hand at the small of his back.

“To look pretty of course,” Pete says, as they sit on the couch—half of it is already taken, so they share the other half, pressed close together. “And to be taller than you.”

“You’re taller than me anyway,” Patrick says, smiling again, before launching into a disquisition over the latest song they’ve been working on; but he keeps losing the thread of the conversation and droops lower and closer until he’s almost leaning on Pete’s side—at which point, Sarah comes over and tells them, very casually, “Hey, so we made up the guest bedroom. Like, just in case _someone_ needed to lie down. Take a nap. You know.”

“Thank you, we just might,” Pete says, smiling up at her with a sudden rush of affection.

*

It’s not the first time they’ve done this, not by far—one of them, slightly more sober, dragging the other, miserably drunk, down a hallway—only now they’re not half-stumbling down the unmemorable carpeted floor of a hotel but down the perfectly polished hardwood floor of Brendon’s home. It’s not like Patrick is actually so drunk that he can’t walk, but Pete doesn’t mind helping him struggle against gravity by keeping an arm around his waist, supporting a bit of his weight.

Downstairs, the party is still going, and it’s such a relief to shut the door of the guest bedroom against the noise and stay on the quiet side. There’s a little light coming in from the ensuite bathroom and Pete doesn’t bother turning on the wall light, just guides Patrick to the bed. He falls back, lying across the blue-gray bedspread, his eyes dropping closed immediately.

“You okay there, buddy?” Pete asks.

“Hmm,” Patrick says. “‘m tired.”

“I bet you are. You’re alright with crashing here?”

“Yeah, okay,” Patrick mumbles, already half-asleep from the look of it—so Pete says, “Come on, you can’t sleep like this,” and Patrick starts pawing blindly at his belt. Pete huffs out a laugh, then takes a deep breath, bracing himself—it’s not like they’ve never helped each other with something like this before, it’s just. Been a while. He kneels on the floor and unlaces Patrick’s boots, takes them off, and in the meantime Patrick has prevailed on his jeans, so Pete helps him peel them off and get under the duvet. He sits on the edge of the bed to slide Patrick’s glasses off his face, setting them on the nightstand, and then he can’t help himself from reaching down to smooth the hair back from Patrick’s forehead, before standing up with a small groan. He’s tired, too—not drunk, but definitely not sober, either.

Patrick finally opens his eyes, his gaze so blurry and his voice so rough as he says, “Don’t go.”

“Just getting you some water,” Pete says, though he does mean to leave after that. He’s pretty sure Patrick will be fully asleep when he comes back and won’t need him anymore. He just needs to sleep it off.

“Yeah, thanks, but—” Patrick reaches up and puts his hand on Pete’s hip, tangling his fingers loosely at the hem of his t-shirt, and Pete is suddenly reminded of his kids, who do this all the time when they need reassurance. “Could you stay? Please?”

The noise from downstairs is so faint that it’s just a low buzz, the light coming in from the bathroom paints everything in shades of blue, and the bed looks soft and warm, and Patrick looks, well. It’s the right choice—he tells himself—he’s supposed to watch over Patrick, keep him safe, spare him the truly classic rockstar death of choking on his own vomit right here in Brendon’s perfectly appointed guest bed. (Patrick’s not that drunk. Pete really wants to stay anyway.)

“Yeah, of course,” he says, and maybe Patrick has fallen asleep, after all, because his only answer is a contented sigh, his hand falling back down.

Pete quickly texts Meagan— _you ok going home by urself?_ —and she doesn’t raise any objections, so he takes off his own boots and jeans and gets ready for bed; in the bathroom, he fills a glass with cold water and turns off the light. He sets the glass down on the nightstand too hard, and curses too loudly at that, but Patrick doesn’t stir. Pete holds his breath as he slides under the covers, but the bed is big enough that he can get in without disturbing Patrick. He lies on his back and allows himself some deep breaths. His heart is jumping up and down in his ribcage, spinning in place. He’s never going to fall asleep like this. He shifts on his side—he meant to turn away from Patrick, but he turns toward him instead, body working on autopilot.

He watches, then, like the creep he clearly still is, as his eyes get used to the darkness. Patrick looks just as perfect as he’s ever looked to him. Pete tries slowing his breath and thinks of all the times they’ve slept like this, close enough to touch, waking up curled into each other like their bodies knew something they didn’t. Maybe it would happen again, now, if only he could get his fucking brain to cooperate and shut down for a bit.

He’s halfway convinced himself he should get up and write something down on his phone, conjure up some memories, the ghosts of van days past—when Patrick suddenly gasps and opens his eyes, wide and scared like a small child’s.

“Hey, it’s okay,” Pete says, and reaches over, clutching his shoulder firmly in an attempt to ground him, because Patrick is looking freaked out and is probably still under the spell of the nightmare or the anxiety spiral that woke him up.

Patrick’s eyes focus, and he says, so softly that Pete can barely hear, “Oh, you’re here,” and comes closer, curling under Pete’s arm and pushing his face into the crook of his shoulder. “Thank you,” he murmurs, and Pete feels his breath on his skin, warm, and he can’t help but pull Patrick in further.

Patrick shifts closer still, nuzzling into Pete’s neck, and then he’s pressing a kiss behind his ear. He’s still dreaming, Pete reasons. Half-asleep, half-drunk, half-confused—and yeah, he knows the math doesn’t add up, of course it fucking doesn’t: kissing him is not a thing that Patrick does, not in the real world.

But maybe Pete has fallen asleep after all, and this is all a dream—it wouldn’t be the first of this kind, not even slightly—because Patrick turns his face aside—they are so close that Pete is drowning in his smell, the heat coming from his skin—and kisses under Pete’s jaw, his cheek, the corner of his mouth.

Pete freezes. “Patrick?” he asks, his voice trembling with that same fear he felt in the car. Patrick looks up and their eyes finally meet—he doesn’t seem drunk anymore, he doesn’t even seem sleepy or confused, his face is open and serious as he blinks, slowly, pushing gently at Pete’s shoulder until he falls back on the pillows. Patrick follows, stretching out against Pete’s side and then there are lips, soft and curious and tentative on his, and when Pete closes his eyes and lets him in, because _of course_ he does, then Patrick kisses him for real. Pete’s thoughts evaporate and he melts into the mattress as Patrick kisses him slow and deep and perfect.


	5. Chapter 5

Patrick hasn’t been this drunk in _years_ —he feels almost high, half out of touch with reality, and it’s not helped by the pulsing light, the pulsing beat of the music, the obsessively repeating lyrics, _baby, baby, baby, take me on, take me on_. He laughs out loud, and the guy he met five minutes ago at the bar pulls back to look at him, saying, “What?” and leaving a cold spot where he was kissing underneath Patrick’s jaw. 

Patrick shakes his head, smiling up at him, and the guy lowers his head and picks up where he left off, popping open the first two buttons of Patrick’s shirt and getting his mouth on his collarbone. Patrick touches the back of his head to hold him close, because it feels _good_ , and he kind of wants more, maybe, but then he sees his own hand sliding over the guy’s nape and just like that he’s slamming against a wall of _wrong_ —his fingers should be buried in long dark straightened hair. 

“Wait,” he says, breathless now, only not for the right reason. No need to get into the specifics with this stranger, though, who seems nice, and appreciative of Patrick’s… whatever, and doesn’t deserve to suffer the consequences of his stupid drama. “I need another drink—I mean. Let me buy you a drink?” 

The guy looks confused, and Patrick can’t blame him—that part was probably supposed to happen before they got to second base against the wall of the club—but he says, “Okay,” and straightens up, offering him a smile that is probably meant to be reassuring, even though he’s still looking at him kind of hungrily. 

Patrick didn’t quite catch the guy’s name before—at least, he thinks they did some sort of introduction while they were standing next to each other at the bar, shortly before he got kissed very thoroughly and with an alarming amount of tongue. He should just shut up and thank his lucky stars, honestly, because the guy, whatever his name—Ethan, maybe?—is not only _nice_ but also very attractive—quite a bit taller than him, quite a bit younger, too, soft reddish curls falling on his forehead, cut shorter at the sides and back of his head, dark eyes. 

Patrick has never been a hookup kind of guy, and, sadly, it seems like his newfound interest in men hasn’t changed that. He buys himself some courage in the form of another whiskey, plus a Vodka Red Bull for the maybe-Ethan. They stand and gulp down their drinks somewhat awkwardly until Patrick feels buzzed again and stops caring about feeling too warm and too old and quite so out-of-place among the heat and the beat and the press of bodies. The way this hot stranger keeps looking at his mouth sparks a rush of confidence that Patrick’s rarely felt except on stage or inside a recording studio. He hangs onto the feeling like a lifeline, grabs the guy—David, was it?—by the hand and drags him toward the bathroom.

Probably-David seems to be on board with the course of events, and as soon as they’re inside the men’s room, he takes the wheel, spinning Patrick around and guiding him into one of the stalls, pushing him against the back of the closed door. He bends forward a bit—this could never work as more than a hookup, Patrick thinks inanely, their necks would kill them after an actual date—and kisses him again. It’s good that he takes control, because Patrick can’t think of anything better than giving it up, than _not thinking anymore_. (Which is precisely what he was trying to do by coming here, to this exclusive and, most importantly, discreet, gay club full of hot people, and in particular what he was trying to do by drinking his body weight in Jameson.)

If this were Patrick’s first time in his life kissing a man, he would be trying to record what's different, what’s similar, the way it’s making him feel. If it were the first time he kissed a new person after his marriage imploded, after twelve years of only kissing his wife, he would think about that, maybe, try to savor the moment. Instead, he’s used up those moments already, their significance wiped out by the fact that the first man he kissed in his life, the first new person he kissed in more than a decade, was _Pete_. 

Pete had kissed him like he couldn’t quite believe it was real, so softly, wondering, but just the brush of his lips was like touching a live wire. Patrick finally understood why people said they were _turned on_ —that kiss had flipped a switch that had been _off_ all his life, something that he didn’t even know existed deep in his core, shifting and heating him up from the inside until he was burning up. 

He can still feel it, a negative space where that fever cooled down, barely simmering as he’s pressed against the back of the stall door and kissed wet and messy and, fuck, the guy slides one leg between his and Patrick can feel where he’s hard against his hip and the guy can feel where Patrick’s… not. 

David or Ethan—Noah!—straightens up, leans back, and asks him if he’s alright. He’s still breathing hard, and even then he’s so _nice_. Patrick would rather have him be a bit of an asshole, because an asshole wouldn’t ask that, and Patrick wouldn’t fucking _break down_ three feet away from a fucking toilet. 

“Oh, honey,” Noah says, and wraps him in a hug that smells of sweat and expensive cologne, and Patrick clings to him and fights down the sobs that would very much like to get out. He gulps in air and manages to calm down, although his face feels burning hot and he’s sure he’s blushing furiously. Which is fair enough, because he’s deeply ashamed. This is what his first gay hookup has come to: a really hot stranger patting his shoulder and going, _there, there_.

“I’m so sorry,” he says, after he’s managed to swallow around the lump in his throat. “I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with me. I’m a lost cause, really.”

“It’s okay,” says Noah, unruffled, stepping back slightly. “No judging, seriously. You want to talk about it?”

Patrick categorically does _not_ want to talk about it, but he figures he owes this kind stranger another drink, just to apologize for leading him on, and then he can go home and lie down on his bathroom floor and be miserable, and Noah—he’s pretty sure it was Noah—can find himself someone hotter, taller, with less personal hang-ups. Someone who’s actually bi, or gay, maybe.

So Patrick buys him another Vodka Red Bull and gets a water for himself, then thanks him for his time like it’s the end of a fucking _job interview_ , and waves goodbye as Noah watches him go because Patrick is _the worst_ at this. The actual worst. He gets outside and requests a Lyft home, and while he waits, he scrolls through his notifications, checks his messages just to be sure.

The last text from Pete reads, _i need some time_. Patrick’s reply is simply, _ok_. He knows it looks bitchy, passive-aggressive, but the truth is he just couldn't find any words. He figures Pete might think he’s angry. He’s not. Pete was so clearly _terrified_ , when they woke up in Brendon’s guest bedroom, tangled up in the sheets and each other. It was heaven, as Patrick opened his eyes and even through the hangover felt so perfectly warm and content—for about ten seconds, until he saw Pete’s face and everything came tumbling down. _Do you even know what you’re doing?_ Pete said, and _This is us, can’t you see, we can’t fuck this up_ , and, _I’ve been here before, Patrick. I know how it ends. It ends with you turning the page on this... experiment, or whatever, and finding a new fucking_ girlfriend _!_

The app tells him the car is six minutes away. He spends them wishing he _could_ be angry—he might use the anger then, to get this whole thing out of his system somehow, to get over it, and then he imagines things could go back to normal. But he can’t bring himself to be angry when he remembers the fear on Pete’s face. _This isn’t real_ , he said, like he was reassuring himself after waking up from a nightmare. _This isn’t real_. That was the point where Patrick kissed him, hard and desperate and needy, and asked him, _Doesn’t this feel real to you?_ But Pete just looked at him, eyes pleading, and Patrick scrambled out of bed, picked up his clothes, and fled, fighting his headache and his nausea and a novel feeling that he could swear was his heart actually breaking. 

The car is here. Patrick climbs in and gives the driver a tired greeting and a tight smile. He doesn’t feel like making small talk. He was sharing kisses with somebody not half an hour before, but that makes him feels so fucking lonely, he _aches_ with it, like he could die from it. By the time he gets home, the buzz has faded and the exhaustion hits him all at once. He drops down on the hallway floor, right inside his front door, to take off his shoes and his leather jacket, leaving everything there on the floor, then he walks to his bedroom and falls straight into bed, kicking off his jeans as he goes, and he watches the ceiling spin, spin, spin. 

Then something really weird happens—he hears something, like a voice inside his head, and whoa, is he even drunker than he thought? Is this a hallucination? He’s never had one before. The voice sounds like his own. It says, _Decide. Surrender. Unravel. Do something for fuck’s sake._

Quick, before he can overthink it, he bends down to get his phone from his jeans pocket and opens his messages and types, _Is this enough time?_

_I miss you_  
_Can’t fucking do this without you_  
_Please don’t let me do this without you_  
_I tried I swear_  
_I just don’t want anybody else_

Then he puts his phone face-down on the bedside table, closes his eyes, and sinks into sleep. As he’s passing out, he suddenly remembers that he has to pick up the kids and bring them to school in three hours.


	6. Chapter 6

When Meagan had told him she wasn’t in love with him anymore, Pete had told Patrick, of course. 

“Okay but, are _you_ in love with _her_?” Patrick asked, brow furrowed.

“I don’t know, man. I love her. We’re a family. That’s more than I thought I’d ever get, you know?”

Patrick looked at him, wearing one of those looks that sometimes, in the past, had given Pete hope, and said, “But why? Why shouldn’t you get _everything_?”

Pete didn’t have an answer, then, but he’s thought about that question a lot, since then. 

Anyway, after Meagan told him that, he considered the idea of repeating his post-divorce implosion, or his post-Mikey self-destructive spiral. The thought didn’t appeal. So he just… opted out. They broke up, but kept on living in the same house and co-parenting their kids; they established some ground rules about childcare and finances and dating other people, and that was that. It’s been working so well that Pete feels occasionally sad that he can’t share their amazing idea with the entire world on Twitter. He’s had the most peaceful couple of years of his entire life.

And then, obviously, Patrick had to go and kiss him. Kiss him _like that_ , by the way—and Pete’s not sure whether he should try to forget that half-hour they spent making out like teenagers before falling asleep together in Brendon’s guest bed, or try to save it in his memory like an HD recording until he breathes his last breath. 

After he wakes up in Patrick’s arms, frozen in fear, and starts making up excuses—Patrick isn’t ready, he doesn’t know his own mind, he’s fucking _grieving_ (this last one is true, though)—after Pete tells him the biggest untruth, that he doesn’t _trust him_ (when has he _ever_ not trusted _Patrick_? It’s such a wild concept that he can’t even understand how his tongue was able to articulate it, what the fuck)—and Patrick, understandably, bolts, Pete goes home and allows himself one single panic attack, after which he crumples on the floor of the master bathoom until Meagan comes in, scoops him up from the Carrara marble, sits him on a kitchen stool, pours black coffee in his black heat-changing Hippogrif mug, and says, “Okay, spill.”

“So Patrick kissed me, and I—”

“You slept together,” she says, “and then you fucked it up.”

“Hey!” Pete protests. “We didn’t sleep together.”

Meagan arches one eyebrow.

“I mean. We slept in the same bed, but we didn’t fuck, or anything, okay?”

The eyebrow stays up. 

“It’s _Patrick_ ,” Pete says helplessly. 

“And Patrick... what? Doesn’t fuck?”

Pete buries his face in his hands, groaning. “ _Meagan_.”

“ _Pete_.”

“I fucked it up.”

“Yeah,” she says, but her voice is softer now, and she reaches out to rub his shoulder. Pete crosses his arms on the table and rests his head on top. He’s still wearing the dark olive shirt he wore to last night’s party. He slept in it. He thrashed around on the bathroom floor in it. It’s silk, and now it’s wrinkled and stained to hell. A lost cause.

“The thing is—” he mumbles. “I really don’t feel like getting my heart broken, you know?”

“Oh, babe...” Meagan says—one of the rules of their break-up deal: they can still call each other _babe_. They agreed it would be sadder to keep biting their tongues, and that showing affection would always beat not showing it. “Babe, isn’t it already too late for that?”

Pete looks up at her and says, “Maybe.” 

“You should call him,” Meagan says, and when Pete stares at her in alarm, she rolls her eyes. “Okay, not like, _now_. But don’t wait too long?” 

Pete straightens up and brings the mug up to his lips, gulping down his coffee, even though it’s still too hot. He sighs and looks out through the glass wall, where the sun is shining and the grass is green and the sky is blue, and the world pretends like everything is fine. 

“You remember you promised you would take the kids to Disneyland today, right?”

“Yeah,” says Pete, because he does, and then, “Shit,” because at the same time he was kind of hoping he had the days mixed up. “Why did I think that was a good idea? The day after a party at Brendon’s?”

“Don’t ask me,” Meagan sing-songs, but she’s smiling, and Pete feels about four percent better. “Come on, eat something—I’ll get them out of bed.” 

He _does_ want to call Patrick, to hear his voice and apologize until Patrick’s not mad anymore, until everything is okay once again. But he can’t, not yet; he needs some time. His hands shake as he texts him that, and Patrick replies: _ok._ At least Patrick isn’t ignoring him. 

The rest of the day flashes by, a blur of rides and pretzels and dole whip, and the day after that is spent recuperating. Pete subsists on detox smoothies, goes for a long run in the afternoon, and falls asleep unbelievably early. Which turns out to be lucky, because he’s woken up at 3 AM by a string of heart-stopping texts from Patrick. Pete calls him immediately, but Patrick doesn’t answer his phone. Obviously—he was drunk, there’s no other explanation for those texts—and Pete can picture all too well the way he must have crashed into bed, half-dressed still, forgetting to take off his glasses. Pete feels a pang, a sudden and painful need to be close to Patrick, to take care of him, like he did the other night, and then, in the morning, they could… 

Wait. What does it mean that Patrick “tried” to want somebody else?

His brain puts everything together super fast—it’s really efficient when it has the chance to reach the worst possible conclusion—the hour, and the wording, and the recklessness of those texts, and oh god. Oh god, this is the worst, _he’s_ the worst, what the fuck. He’s suddenly blindsided with jealousy just thinking about Patrick drunk in a bar somewhere and somebody else flirting with him, touching him, putting a blush on his cheeks, a fucking stranger—some random _guy_ that’s not Pete. He’s making himself sick with it but he can’t stop picturing it. 

Pete breathes. He reminds himself that he’s not twenty-three anymore, not a jealous asshole anymore; he meditates himself off the ledge, somehow, then gets up and writes until the morning, a seamless flow of words like he hasn’t written in ages. 

*

This place is so pretentious that it doesn’t even have a _sign_. Patrick suggested it when he finally, finally called Pete back, and they decided to meet for coffee and, ominously— _talk_.

It’s one of those days when Pete’s shoes pinch, his clothes rub, his skin itches, and he’d really like to shave off all his hair, and Patrick is staring at Pete’s phone screen, so deeply focused that he doesn’t even look up when the waitress brings them their order. Pete nods and thanks her—they can’t be _both_ borderline rude to the staff.

They got here within two minutes of each other, and sat down, and looked at their shoes, and at the blackboard that said they could sample a cup of Chikmagalur coffee for 12 dollars, and at the other, bizarrely dressed patrons—until Pete said, “I have some new lyrics, if you want, um. First?” and Patrick’s shoulders visibly untensed before he made grabby hands at Pete’s phone. 

They’ve been doing this for almost twenty years—Pete watching Patrick reading his lyrics. It’s a weird and unique form of torture. As he waits, he wishes he had a second phone to play around with. He sips his iced vanilla latte—it’s delicious. He nudges Patrick’s cup towards him, finally breaking his concentration.

“Oh! Sorry,” Patrick says, smiling brightly at Pete like he’s surprised to see him still sitting here. He brings the cup up and sniffs his matcha latte, then takes a sip and hums in apparent satisfaction. 

“Good?” asks Pete.

“What, the latte? Or the lyrics?” Patrick says, setting down his drink and catching a bit of stray foam off the curve of his upper lip with the tip of his tongue. Which Pete only notices because the foam is green, which is. Different. 

“What? Oh, either. I mean, both?” Wow. _Wow_. Someone should just put him out of his misery, honestly. 

“Well, the latte is amazing,” Patrick says, and drinks some more of it, and then just watches Pete, smirking. 

“Oh, _fuck you_.” 

They laugh, and then their eyes meet and there’s a brief silence while Patrick is still looking at him, still smiling softly, and everything feels so _normal_ at that moment, but it doesn’t last. Pete lowers his eyes, and Patrick says, “So, you think this is, what? Just a midlife crisis?”

“Patrick, no,” Pete replies, and then Patrick looks at him, and the words get stuck in his throat. He’s been thinking about what to say. He had a plan—apologize a lot, and then say something fully supportive but still reasonable and cautious, something to buy himself some more time. Now, though, with Patrick’s gaze on him, warm and unwavering, he can’t even remember what the plan was. He doesn’t have to explain himself. Patrick knows him better than anyone else; he’s cottoned on to his extreme fucking terror, and he knows the reason behind it. “I don’t think it’s just a midlife crisis. I don’t think it’s _just_ anything. But I think… you’re lonely, and still upset, and it’s too soon for you to—”

Patrick lowers his eyes, then, and purses his mouth, and his expression is either mad or sad, Pete can’t really read it. Realizing he forgot the part where he was supposed to apologize a lot, he says, “I’m sorry, Patrick, I was just—I’m really sorry.”

“Yeah,” says Patrick, without looking up. “Yeah, okay.” And Pete knows that tone. Patrick is _hurt_. And when he’s hurt, he will either lash out or shut down, and neither is a desirable outcome. Pete rewinds the conversation—Patrick didn’t want an apology. Because… wait a fucking second.

“Do you seriously think I don’t _want you_?” Pete asks, way too loud, and Patrick looks up in alarm. Pete scoots his chair closer to Patrick’s round the small table. “ _Patrick_ ,” he whisper-shouts. “I can’t believe I need to spell this out for you. I’ve wanted you since you were below the age of consent. I’ve never fucking stopped. Fuck, how could you _not know that_.” Patrick is looking straight at him, wide-eyed and blushing and very close, and for a second Pete can see the ghost of that boy, too young and too beautiful and too talented, and he’s just—”I’m sorry I told you this wasn’t real. It’s the opposite, fuck, it’s _hyper_ real, Jesus—we can’t do this here. Come on.”

So much for reasonable and cautious. Pete is so nervous he’s vibrating out of his skin, he feels like he’s burning up, completely unable to sit down for another second; he stands up and leaves some money on the table—20 dollars, 50, _who the fuck cares_. “Come on,” he repeats, and Patrick gets out of his chair and follows him outside to his car. He doesn’t look upset or angry anymore: he looks _stunned_ , like what Pete said was some big revelation or something. Pete can’t fucking believe it. 

Neither of them say a word as he starts the car and starts driving toward Patrick’s house.

“Pete?” Patrick eventually asks, tentative, and brushes a finger against the back of Pete’s hand on the steering wheel. It would be pretty fucking ironic if Pete drove them right off the road now that this thing is finally happening, so he signals. They’re in a residential street, not too far from Patrick’s house; Pete pulls over and stops the car under the shadow of some leafy trees that line the road. He keeps his hands on the wheel and breathes. 

“Look—” he starts, and shifts in the driver’s seat until he’s half-facing Patrick, who does the same until they’re looking at each other, breathing hard. It feels like they’re on the brink of something, flying or falling or both. “You have to realize. I never thought this was possible. I’ve thought _forever_ that it wouldn’t happen. Never ever. It’s like—I’ve built a life around… around the impossibility of me and you. It took me a long fucking time to lose hope, and—”

“Get it back,” Patrick blurts out, quick, like oxygen that he’s held in too long. “Please, get it back, I know you can.” He grabs Pete’s hand over the gearshift and squeezes. Pete knows what Patrick’s hands feel like, but everything feels sharper now, Patrick’s rough fingertips and soft palm and slender fingers, and how his hand is smaller than Pete’s, how he can surround it with his own if he closes his own fingers like this. 

“Are you really sure?” Pete asks, barely recognizing his own voice, which is low and scared like a small animal. “You know I’m—not great at romantic relationships.”

“You’re great at relationships with me, though,” Patrick says, reaching up to stroke Pete’s hair back from his forehead and resting his palm just there, at the side of his face, and Pete can’t help pressing into it, just a bit. “You’ll see.” 


	7. Chapter 7

As soon as the front door clicks shut behind Patrick’s back, Pete turns around and crowds him against it, setting his palms against the wall at the sides of Patrick’s head, and then—stops. They’re not kissing, they’re not touching anywhere, Pete is just looking at him, breathing in, out, and Patrick tries to follow the same rhythm, to calm down a bit. His skin feels too tight, tingly, simmering with a low flame that could be soothed if only Pete touched him, everywhere, anywhere, just, _now_. Distantly, Patrick is aware that he could be the one to move, but he’s completely frozen. He can only breathe and stare into Pete’s eyes, grown so dark that just a hint of gold shines out. They’re still standing just inside Patrick’s house, and it’s the middle of the afternoon, but it’s almost dark because Patrick had closed all the blinds before going out.

“God, Patrick,” Pete sighs out, placing a careful hand on Patrick’s jaw, framing his face, looking at him for one more second before he’s finally, _finally_ kissing him. The last time, at Brendon’s, Patrick was still a bit drunk, and Pete was very gentle, barely kissing back, just softening his lips and opening up for him and letting Patrick explore and try Pete on for size. This time, Pete kisses like he fucking means it, like he’s trying to prove a point. Patrick whimpers and clutches at Pete’s shoulders through his shirt. He feels graceless and desperate and fuck if he cares. 

Somehow, Pete is now pressing him against the back of the front door, and now that he’s started touching him, it looks like he can’t stop.

That’s not new. Pete has always plastered himself against Patrick’s back as they played shows in front of hundreds, then thousands, of people—sat too close during interviews, pressed his thigh hot against Patrick’s under the table at endless signings—cuddled up to him like a puppy in the back of the van, curled into him like a comma in too-small bus bunks and hotel beds, before they had their own too-big beds in their own too-big rooms, before they stopped touching on stage, just hunching toward each other to play a few beats, a careful foot of distance between them, creating an optical illusion of physical closeness for the fans until Patrick bounced away, leaving Pete with his back still bowed and his bass angled to the empty air. 

So maybe it is new, or new again, and it’s not so surprising, after all, that Pete touches him like he’s double-checking that Patrick is real, his hands hot and broad at the side of Patrick’s neck, brushing his shoulders, down his arms, stopping at his waist just to pull him even closer, until they’re pressed together so tightly that they have to breathe in perfect asynchronicity or not at all. 

What _is_ oxygen, anyway, what purpose does it even serve, when Patrick can kiss Pete back and finally memorize the way he tastes besides distant memories of cinnamon gum and peppermint chapstick. He kisses Pete like he’s wanted to do for a few months to a couple of decades, and Patrick wouldn’t notice right now—he wouldn’t fucking _stop_ even if the world on the other side of the door was ending. 

Pete hums, and moves his hands again, at Patrick’s hips and lower, stroking at him through layers of denim and cotton, just lightly, and it shouldn’t feel this good, but it does, it feels so good that it’s unreal and at the same time it’s the realest thing Patrick has ever felt. When Pete lines up their hips, Patrick gasps out, breaking the kiss, closing his eyes and rolling his head back against the door, needing to feel the pressure in order not to slide to the floor or float away somewhere.

Pete presses his palm above Patrick’s heart over his shirt and curls the fingers of his other hand inside the waistband of his jeans. Patrick opens his eyes again because he can’t bear to miss one second of this, of Pete wanting him like this. Pete is breathing hard, staring at Patrick with wide eyes and _blushing_. He gulps in a breath and says, “Can I—”

“Yeah, yes, anything,” Patrick replies, his voice wrecked like after a two-hour show. 

Pete drops to his knees. The sight alone sends a shiver through Patrick’s entire being. His knees wobble; his heart flounders. There is no way he’s surviving this. But Pete is so careful, looking up at him again and again, clearly to check for any sign of doubt or hesitation as he unbuttons his jeans, pressing open-mouthed kisses to his belly and hip bones and above the elastic of his underwear. Patrick reaches one hand down and strokes the side of his face, and Pete presses his cheek into his palm like a cat. Patrick can’t understand how he can feel so turned on and so tenderly fond at the same time, but that’s Pete for you—disarming yet infuriating, incredibly sweet yet so fucking sexy that you can’t think straight. 

He’s so gentle as he pulls down Patrick’s jeans and boxer-briefs, as he slides a hand around the back of Patrick’s thigh and curls the fingers of his other hand around the base of Patrick’s dick. Pete looks up at him one more time and must see something in Patrick’s eyes that makes him say, “I’ve always wanted you. You’re all I ever wanted,” before he takes Patrick into his mouth and sucks gently at the head, and Patrick has never felt like this in his life, like his whole body is made of liquid gold, every point where Pete is sucking, stroking, clutching at him feeling white-hot; it’s the sweetest pressure building up and up and Patrick’s not going to last, especially if he keeps looking down at Pete’s lips stretched out around him, his dark lashes fluttering as he bobs his head and takes Patrick deeper and, yeah. This is going to be over _so soon_. 

His hand has ended up in Pete’s hair, somehow, without him even noticing, so Patrick tightens his fingers in an attempt to warn him, but Pete just moans softly and opens his eyes to look up at him—lit up with an incandescent mix of love and desire—and Patrick surrenders, comes inside Pete’s hot, wet mouth groaning out his name and god’s and other unintelligible things. His knees give and he just lets go, trusting that Pete won’t let him fall. 

He’s right—Pete catches him mid-collapse and pulls Patrick down on top of him. They crumple on the rug in slow motion: Pete stretches out below him, and Patrick buries his face into the crook of Pete’s neck and reacquaints himself with breathing. He’s tingling all over, like the orgasm Pete just gave him was a particularly big stone thrown into a particularly still body of water that can’t stop rippling. The metaphor might have slipped away from him a bit, but his brain is a bit scrambled, whatever, he’s just gotten his first blowjob from a guy, and it was _Pete_ , looking at him as Patrick fell apart, who’s looked at him that way for so long, even if Patrick pretended not to see, even if maybe Pete had stopped looking, for a while. Those golden, incredible eyes have looked at him under every light and through every pretense, with that same adoring hunger, and Patrick is finally, finally ready to give in. _I’ll eat you up, I love you so_. Okay. 

Okay.

He can feel Pete’s chest heaving under his weight, and as he raises his head, Patrick realizes that—oh. Pete’s still fully dressed, his jeans are still done up, and he’s breathing through his nose, his eyes shut, and pressing his palm on his own stomach as to calm himself down, like he thinks that Patrick won’t—

“Pete,” Patrick says, shifting on his side, “oh, sweetheart.” He pulls him in, turning Pete’s face with a hand on his jaw, to kiss him and kiss him, softly, until Pete shifts as well and they’re lying on the rug, facing each other, and Pete kisses back, going pliant in Patrick’s arms. 

Patrick reaches down where Pete is so hard that Patrick can feel him inside his jeans. He strokes him like that, through the heavy fabric, and Pete makes a helpless sound that hits Patrick somewhere halfway between his dick and his heart. He’s never done this, never touched another man like this, but there’s no time to panic, or get caught in his own head—he needs to make Pete come _right now_. _Keep it simple_ , he tells himself, unbuttoning the jeans, slipping his hand inside and curling it around Pete’s cock. It’s hot and smooth, so similar and different from his own, throbbing in his hand as he starts stroking Pete off like he does himself, a fast rhythm, but then Pete’s hips stutter and he makes a punched-out sound and he grips Patrick’s shoulder like he’s afraid of slipping away, and Patrick thinks, _not yet, actually,_ so he slows down, tightening his hand around him, and Pete sighs heavily, hiding his face into Patrick’s neck. 

Patrick keeps stroking him slowly, and when he tries twisting his wrist, Pete moans and starts pushing into his hand; Patrick increases the tempo, just a bit, and whispers into Pete’s ear, “Yeah, come on, come on,” and Pete cries out, clutching Patrick’s shoulder so hard that it will probably bruise, and comes all over Patrick’s hand, making a mess of his jeans and underwear and Patrick’s shirt.

Patrick pulls Pete closer into his side and slides his cleaner hand through the short hair at the side of Pete’s head. “Jesus Christ,” Pete mumbles, breathing hot into the skin behind Patrick’s ear. “You—” he stops, and shakes his head, and leans in for a kiss. It’s shallow and sweet, except Patrick can taste himself on Pete’s lips and that gets him thinking about a second round, until he remembers that he hasn’t been seventeen in a long while. 

*

It wouldn’t be accurate to say seventeen-year-old Patrick didn’t notice the way Pete’s two-sizes-too-small band shirts rode up as he played, or his tattoos, or his piercings, or his fucking smile. It wouldn’t be true to say Patrick hadn’t _felt it_ —years later—every time Travie put one of his huge hands on his shoulders while they were working in the studio. He couldn’t say he’d never found himself staring at some stranger, at some party, whose dress shirt was stretched over broad shoulders. He’d tried to write it off, ignore it. There was a knot of wrongness and guilt inside him, but he didn’t act on it, so—it wasn’t real. It wasn’t real if nothing ever happened. 

There was this night, a few years before, as he was looking at himself in the bathroom mirror after brushing his teeth, his wife getting ready for bed at the other sink right next to him, her elbow bumping into his soft side. He felt so content, so safe, that he thought it’d be okay. He said something about those feelings he used to have, sometimes, when he was younger, just hinting at the issue, not naming names and leaving Pete well out of it. 

“Yeah,” she said, and looked at him calmly, but Patrick could see a tinge of disappointment in her face. 

“Yeah? I mean—you knew?” he asked her, feeling almost sick now. He pretended he hadn’t washed his face five minutes before and splashed himself with some cold water, hoping it would keep at bay the furious flush of shame he felt heating up his face. 

“No, I didn’t know, but—what does this accomplish? We’re married, Patrick.”

 _It doesn’t have to accomplish anything_ , he thought. _It’s just who I am_. But he didn’t say anything; he let her change the subject, and then they went to bed, and as he turned off the light, he thought, _This is the last time I’m going to talk about that_.

*

On Saturday night, miraculously, the kids get sleepy at the same time, and Patrick takes them both upstairs, carrying the younger one and gently nudging the older up the stairs when he slows down, on the verge of passing out standing up. They fall asleep so fast that he can’t even put his plan of playing them lullabies on his acoustic—something he’s always wanted to do for them but that was deemed ridiculous by their mom (one of her many _should_ s: _they should learn to fall asleep on their own. No point indulging them like that, making a whole production of it. Bedtime should be a no-frills affair_.)

Sunday goes well—they wake up early and make pancakes and watch cartoons, and well before he’s ready, it’s time to bring them back. Everything feels different, though, lighter—he’s not going back to his empty apartment after he’s dropped them off. Well, he is, but Pete is coming over later and they’re going to order take-out and pretend to watch a movie they already know by heart and fool around instead, before falling asleep tangled together like they’ve done for the past week. His bed now smells like the two of them, and there’s a drawer in Patrick’s closet now for Pete’s DC2C t-shirts and oversized hoodies, and Patrick is getting used to seeing Pete’s ridiculous gold watch next to his own glasses and phone on the nightstand every morning.

As he’s having the traditional weekly kids-drop-off conversation with his ex—homework to finish, items of clothing lost and found, school functions to attend, birthday party invites to RSVP to—Patrick gets a text from Pete ( _rushmore + pizza OR say anything + sushi?_ ) and he gets distracted. She looks at him, bemusedly, and asks, “Everything okay?”

“Yeah, just Pete,” he replies, thoughtlessly, and he can’t help but smile. 

As she looks at him for a little too long, he can see the wheels turning and the whole thing clicking in her head. In the end, all she says is, “Of course,” with the exasperated sigh and eyerolling she has always reserved for Pete’s intrusions into their life. Patrick just gets through the rest of the conversation and leaves. 

_Why not Rushmore and sushi?_ he texts Pete from the car, already knowing what reply he’s going to get, and sure enough— _they dont go together, rick_

 _Obviously_ , Patrick replies, and gets a smiling emoji, a winky one, and the one with the two lady dancers. He leaves it at that. He’s almost home.


	8. Coda—For the time being

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I thought this was done, but it wasn't. Now it is. The biggest thanks to @andwhatyousaid for letting me incorporate a tender, wonderful vignette she wrote back when this story didn't even exist but which magically turned out to be the perfect beginning to this coda. 
> 
> (In case anyone feels like rereading the whole thing, I have taken the chance to clean everything up a bit and do some minor edits, so your reading experience should be about 2.7% better.)

In their bed, Pete tries to bury his face in the pillows, but Patrick shakes him awake again, sounding just as bleary as Pete feels, saying, “It's your turn.”

“But is it even a time for humans to be alive,” Pete mumbles. It's dark out, the sun not fully up yet, the room cold and still, and their alarm won't stop beeping annoyingly in the background, way too cheery. Patrick soothes him by running his fingers down the back of Pete's neck, into his hair, gentle and warm.

“No,” says Patrick, in answer. “But our kids can’t be truant just because we don’t ever wanna get up.” And he’s right, it is Pete’s turn for the school drop-off, so he makes himself roll over and kisses him, could stay all day in bed and just do that, but then he hauls himself up, forcing himself out of the sheets and duvet.

He scrambles on whatever’s on the floor: his bleached jeans and warm black skull socks and an open hoodie over his sleep shirt and a jacket over that because it’s cold as a motherfucker this early, he can just imagine the chill hustling to the car and the floor will be freezing downstairs anyway, and Patrick laughs at him from the bed, saying, “You are so weird.” But fondly. 

“Aren’t you still supposed to be asleep?” Pete asks, squinting at him in the half-light. He kind of wants a hat for his hair, and kind of can’t be bothered to find one. “Isn't that the whole point, that it’s my turn?”

Patrick says, “Alright, alright,” hassled, fluffing his pillow, settling in. “Are you gonna go through that Starbucks drive-thru on the way back?” he says, half into the pillows, and half at Pete, who’s by the bedroom door now.

Pete says, “Maybe, if you keep that warm for me,” and points at his empty spot next to Patrick in the bed. Patrick smiles sleepily back at him, a promise—and Pete doesn't know how he could even question it. Of course he’s going to go through the drive-thru.

He wakes up the kids, including the one he has to carry to the couch so he can finish waking up there, all wrapped up in the fluffy plaid blanket—it’s lucky that Pete is totally an expert at wrangling sleepy, plaintive Stumps in the early morning. 

He turns on the coffeemaker and starts checking on backpacks and various belongings and tries to forget less than three things. The joint school run is a relatively new thing, and honestly a day where they forget less than three things is a good one, at least for the time being. 

_For the time being_. Pete read this book once; he picked it up on a whim because it dealt with the 2011 tsunami in Japan which he’d been obsessed with. And he liked the title, _A Tale for the Time Being_. It’s a play on words, and it changes meaning depending on how you look at it, like one of those ambiguous images, the vase that becomes two faces or the duck that’s a rabbit that’s a duck and so on. 

His favorite meaning is the one where the _time being_ is the person the story is for; and since a time being is every one of us, the story is for everyone ever. It’s a Zen thing, of course—living in time, unable to escape it being the very defining trait of our humanity—but he feels that definition applies to himself in a special way. 

He feels _so much_ like a time being, his head constantly bouncing between now and then, refracting through past memories perfectly preserved as if in amber, often getting lost on its way back to the present moment. In time, he’s found different things that can help, when he needs something to pull him back into the here-and-now, an anchor—getting a tattoo; making a record; his back hitting the stage after a show, silvery foil confetti raining down on him, the kids roaring in his ears; his children, naturally.

Patrick was a strange kind of anchor in that he used to pull Pete up, sometimes, and sometimes he dragged him to the bottom. It was too easy to look at him and see the future in the early days of their friendship; too easy to look at him and see all the past they’d been through after the years started piling up like pages in a calendar—many years, many pasts. 

Now that he has Patrick like this, though, in all the ways he used to plus others he used to dream about, Pete may be the most grounded he’s ever been. It feels so perfectly _new_ , like that elusive creature—early morning after a full night’s rest. Having him like this: no need to bite down on the terms of endearment or wrap them in jokes until no revealing truth peeks out, no need to add clauses in fine print to his _I love you_ s like the lawyer’s kid he is, no need to carefully allocate touch as some precious resource regulated by opaque terms of contract—it all feels like the missing piece, like finally grasping that thing he’s always missed, even long before he ever had it. 

He still thinks about the past, like, all the fucking time—but he’s not helplessly thrown into it, he can just look at it run by, as if through a window, safe behind the glass. He’ll still lose seconds gazing at Patrick and see his past self, all the versions of him that Pete has loved, and what he realizes in those moments is—nothing has changed, not inside himself. He’s always loved Patrick to excess, always wanted to shout it from the rooftops, always felt like his skin couldn’t possibly contain it. He’s always been afraid of being too much, being found out, driving him away. He still is. But he’s working on it. 

“So, what’s different?” Andy had asked him a few months ago, while Pete was visiting him in Portland.

They were in Andy’s café, and Pete thought about it while he stole a sip from Andy’s almond milk latte. “We spend more time together, I guess. We don’t have to have a reason, you know? Not like it was before. And um, our kids play together all the time, which is sweet. I don’t know, we’re still us.”

“And I’m guessing you have sex.”

“Well, yeah.”

“And you didn’t before.” 

“Of course we didn’t before! What the fuck?”

Andy raised an eyebrow. “Was that such a wild assumption to make?”

“He was married.”

“Hm. But you wanted to, right? I mean, you always have.”

“Well, yeah. I don’t think I was exactly subtle.”

“Yeah, that’s not the word I’d use,” Andy confirmed. There was a beat of silence, and then, “I’m really happy for you. Now stop stealing my coffee, fucker,” and that was that.

Sex isn’t the main thing, of course. Sex isn’t the point of this new thing between them, it’s so much bigger than that, but there is something about it that Pete hasn’t ever felt with anyone. It’s not like he’s ever held back much of himself in his previous romantic relationships, but the intimacy he has with Patrick is on a different level; if he was naked before, now he’s peeled back all his skin, opening up his ribcage for Patrick to see, to control the rhythm and quality of Pete’s heartbeat by applying some pressure to a certain spot on his neck, by crooking one finger just the right way. It’s not about the sex, but—fuck. It’s what he imagines mind-meld sex would be like, a connection so strong that it reaches across a couple of galaxies, and maybe that’s what he should have told Andy—it’s just them, spending more time together and having force-dyad, universe-ruining sex. 

Like the first time Patrick fucked him, which took a while after they got together—they weren’t in a rush, actually, since just kissing and kissing some more and letting their hands stray felt so good that they often forgot there were other options—but when it happened, on one of those rare kid-free weekends that felt as if they stretched endlessly in front of them and yet were always over way too soon, they’d ended up spending one entire evening in bed, and Pete felt like he was losing what was left of his mind, needing somethingto weigh him down, something to soothe that frantic feeling at the back of his throat, and in trying to convey this to Patrick, who was both the cause and the only possible remedy, he somehow, quite involuntarily, sobbed out, _more_ , and Patrick asked, _yeah?_ , looking so hesitant, so hopeful, as if he’d been waiting for Pete to ask, and that—that had only made Pete even crazier, because who had ever waited for _him_? Most people he’d been with had just assumed he would be into the weirdest shit, as if he was unshockable, impossible to upset, up for anything and everything (to be fair, he’d never said anything to correct the misperception; somehow, saying _no_ had almost felt more vulnerable than just going along with it) and the careful eagerness in Patrick’s voice was the last straw: Pete realized that he was still holding some reservations at the same time that he felt them fall away completely, breaking apart like wet paper in his hands as a flood or words he couldn’t really stop or control issued forth—y _es Patrick yes more of course more fuck everything everything everything_ , and Patrick shushed him with a kiss, stroked the hair back from his forehead, and smiled at him, the devastating, self-satisfied smile that Pete used to see only onstage and now also gets to see in bed, and Pete felt himself smile back, every last tiny shred of uncertainty melting away under the heat of Patrick’s regard, and then Patrick said, “I did some research,” and, “Don’t you know I am a perfectionist?” and he proceeded to take Pete apart completely. 

Which is, like, absolutely not what Pete should be thinking about while driving a car full of kids between 4 and 12 years of age. 

“Dad, what was the new song Patrick was playing last night, put it on,” Bronx orders, and Pete is happy to comply. It was Lifetime, the original being twice as fast and twelve times as noisy, but no one in the car complains—they’re all used to Pete’s questionable music choices, especially in the morning when only a serious amount of coffee and Metallica can hope to wake him up. 

Patrick can turn anything into a lullaby, including, apparently, _Turnpike Gates_ , which is such a throwback to their youth that Pete’s pretty sure Patrick chose it deliberately. The bedtime concerts, the way they’ve become routine already, fill Pete with a sense of rightness—this is so clearly the way it should be, his children falling asleep to Patrick’s singing just as he used to, back when he was a desperate boy begging for anything Patrick would give him, absurdly grateful to have insomnia as an excuse to want Patrick in his bunk, or on the phone, until he fell asleep or pretended to. Now he doesn’t need excuses or pretending, and Patrick fits into their family seamlessly, effortlessly; Bronx gently roasting him when he complains about Fortnite being too violent; Meagan making his favorite green curry for dinner when they spend the evening at what has become _her_ house since Pete for all intents and purposes moved in with Patrick; “Let’s go home,” Patrick had said one night, distractedly, and “Sure, yeah,” Pete had replied, trying to remember how to breathe. So Patrick plays Neil Young and Mission of Burma and Ariana Grande for the kids, and Pete listens in, every night, without fail, and silently thinks Patrick is playing for him too, maybe, partly; then they say a few _goodnight_ s, kiss a few foreheads, pull up a couple of blankets, and once everyone is tucked in and safely asleep, Pete drags Patrick to the bedroom ( _their_ bedroom), pushes him against the closed door, and gets on his knees. 

Which, again—really not an appropriate line of thought for the school run. It’s just—god. Maybe the honeymoon stage will be over at some point, but Pete wouldn’t bet on it. 

He’s distracted from his distraction by the actual dropping-off of children at their respective schools, and then he’s alone in the car, wishing he hadn’t promised Patrick coffee because each second he has to stay away feels like purgatory. He doesn’t put any music back on because nothing feels right, there’s no possible cure to this weird restlessness—close to anxiety but not quite it—other than being home again. Home. Nothing and no one has ever felt more like home than Patrick, and now they’re one and the same, and Pete is getting over this approximately never. 

But he did promise, so he gets Patrick’s usual coffee order and something sinfully sugary for himself from the Starbucks drive-thru, and drums his fingers on the steering wheel, and reminds himself to unclench his jaw and lower his shoulders, and drives home.

Pete has no memory or real perception of the path from front door to bedroom; he loses his shoes and jacket and hoodie somewhere on the way, and then he’s standing next to the bed, where Patrick is still buried motionless under the duvet. He sets the coffees on the nightstand, slides his jeans off, leaving them carelessly crumpled on the floor, and crawls back into bed, huffing out a breath. Everything’s soft and warm and the sheets smell like the two of them and Pete could die happy right now. 

Patrick hums, says sleepily, “I smell coffee,” shifting closer and breathing warmly against Pete’s neck, where his skin is still cold from being outside. “Sweetheart,” he says, softly, Pete’s number one favorite pet name. “You didn’t have to.” 

“Yes I did,” he objects, turning until he’s well ensconced into Patrick’s arms, nuzzling into his neck. Warm, warm. He could even fall asleep again, maybe. “I promised.” 

“So noble,” Patrick says, teasing, and then, tangling their legs together, which has the side effect of grinding his half-hard dick into Pete’s hip, “However shall I repay you?” 

Every last chance of falling back asleep dies an instant and messy death. Pete’s probably supposed to tease back now, say something clever and flirty and pretend he doesn’t know what Patrick’s _implying_ here, or ask for some utterly domestic, non-sexual favor as compensation for the coffee, but he couldn’t keep up the charade for more than a fraction of a second anyway, so he just does what comes natural, which is being so fucking easy for Patrick—he grabs his hip, pulling him closer, and kisses him wet and dirty. 

It’s a bit zero to sixty, maybe, but Patrick doesn’t seem to mind, taking over the kiss and breaking it only to bite at Pete’s bottom lip before he says, voice low and rough right next to his ear, “Tell me what you want.”

Pete’s still savoring the sting from the bite, and he’s still kind of sleepy and already so turned on he could cry, and he doesn’t know what he wants. Everything is fine. “Patrick, please,” he whines, hoping it conveys the message. 

Patrick watches him for a long second, his eyes getting darker, then he kisses him again, hungry and perfect as he pulls up Pete’s shirt to get at him, running his warm clever fingers against Pete’s side, at the small of his back, just inside the waistband of his underwear. Pete shakes and shivers and melts and reaches down, less poetically, to shape Patrick’s cock through the fabric of his pajamas. 

“Fuck,” they say in unison, which startles a laugh out of them both. Patrick rolls his forehead against Pete’s, kisses him again, softer now, coaxes him fully out of his shirt, saying, “Come on,” in encouragement. 

“Yeah, you too,” Pete says between kisses, and Patrick fumbles with his own pants and shirt until all their clothing is a tangled ball at the bottom of the bed and no one cares. 

Patrick is all light, warm skin, messy bed-head and his incredible bluegold eyes. “So?” he says, smiling. It’s just like having the sun right next to you in bed, Pete thinks. 

“What?” 

“What do you want?” Patrick repeats patiently, and Pete has loved him since the day he met him and more every day since. It’s a fucking long time, a number of days that’s hard to fathom, but Pete has done the math, and it all adds up. It’s just endless fucking love. The kind the really good poems are about. 

“You,” Pete says, and kisses him, again and again, pulling him closer, closer, until they’re pressed together everywhere and they both moan at how good it feels. “I want you, every day, for the rest of our lives.” He pushes his face into the crook of Patrick’s neck so he can’t embarrass himself further. 

“Hey,” Patrick says, knotting his fingers in the shorter hair at Pete’s nape and holding on. “Pete, hey, don’t hide, look at me,” and Pete does, and there it is, the broken-open feeling, the open-heart-surgery feeling. Without breaking his gaze, Patrick strokes at the side of Pete’s neck with his thumb, drawing an helpless moan out of him, then moves his hand lower, further down his body and under the covers where they’re pressed together and almost too warm by now. He gets close enough to kiss except he doesn’t, not quite, stays just out of reach even as his hand finally closes around them both and starts stroking, almost too dry and almost too much but actually perfect—or it would be if only Patrick would fucking _kiss_ _him_ , Pete is going crazy with it, he’s not going to last and he needs Patrick’s mouth on his or he’s going to actually, literally break into a thousand pieces, he just knows it. 

“Okay,” Patrick eventually says between labored breaths that Pete can feel on his lips, hot and maddening. “Every day, forever, that’s fine by me,” and he twists his wrist precisely right as he finally, finally kisses Pete, and Pete’s gone, done for, out of time. 

He opens his eyes and Patrick’s still looking at him, smiling softly, looking a bit dazed; everything feels so good that Pete thinks maybe he’s a sun too, maybe they’re twin stars after all. How could he survive, otherwise, without melting, vaporizing to nothing? 

“We’re twin stars,” he tells Patrick, because Patrick might get it, or in any case won’t judge him for saying something stupid when he’s sex-drunk, especially when it’s Patrick’s own fault for obliterating him so completely. 

Patrick just hums, then looks down and makes a face at their mess. “Twin stars who really need a shower,” he says, but Pete can’t help but notice he makes no attempt to get out of bed, just starts stroking Pete’s hair again, in a slow, regular rhythm. 

“Yeah. Let’s stay here, though,” he mumbles, already half asleep. “Just a little while. Just for the time being.” 


End file.
